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Once an affordable option, rooming houses becoming harder to find A place to land
The Spectrum & Daily News17 Mar 2024Antonia Noori Farzan Providence Journal USA TODAY NETWORK
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WOONSOCKET, R.I. – Long before Russell Archambault was born, his mother needed to escape her first marriage.
Desperate to leave her drunken husband, she wound up in a rooming house. It was a disgusting place, infested with bedbugs and rats, she'd later tell her son.
“That always took me a little bit, how she had to live,” Archambault said.
Rooming houses – where tenants rent a single furnished room with no kitchen and share a bathroom – have a reputation for squalid living conditions, but they are often a refuge for people with nowhere else to go. Also known as boarding houses or single-room occupancy hotels, they're one of the cheapest forms of housing on the market.
They're also increasingly hard to find. Woonsocket, Rhode Island, which had 19 licensed rooming houses in 1964, is down to just four today. Nationwide, the number of rooming house residents shrank from 634,000 in 1960 to 330,000 a decade later. Today, the U.S. Census Bureau doesn't track that figure.
Few policymakers have lamented their slow disappearance, even as Rhode Island faces a statewide shortage of affordable housing and a steep rise in homelessness. That doesn't surprise Archambault, who owns two of Woonsocket's last remaining rooming houses and said his mother's experience inspired him to provide safe, clean and decent accommodations for low-income tenants.
“People have the perception that rooming houses are just for drunks, drug addicts and worthless people,” said Archambault, now 71. He takes issue with those assumptions: “I could take you to every room, and they're all good, good people.”
Life in a rooming house
Ed LeBlanc lives in a small but impeccably tidy first-floor room where a microwave and toaster oven sit a few feet away from his recliner and neatly made bed. Cacti, pothos and snake plants – many of which he nursed back to life after they were left behind by other tenants – line glass shelves in front of the single window.
Before moving into the rooming house four years ago, he said, he mainly slept in his car or on the dirt floor of a friend’s basement. Now, he helps to manage the building.
“It’s comfortable here, very comfortable,” he said. “You just have to adapt.”
The lifestyle isn’t glamorous. Tenants carry their own toilet paper and soap on trips to the bathroom, but rooms are equipped with mattresses that typically retail for $1,500, new compact refrigerators and matching secondhand furniture.
Free Wi-Fi and cable are included with the rent. He maintains a zero-tolerance policy when it comes to drug use and bans potential fire hazards such as extension cords. A cleaner comes at least five times a week to scrub the common areas.
Archambault purchased the two Woonsocket buildings with 30 and 26 rooms in the 1980s. He says he’s devoted his life to improving them – from installing fire-safe hardware to cracking down on problem tenants.
Rooming houses through history
Rooming houses didn’t always carry a stigma. They began popping up toward the end of the 19th century, in an era when it was already common for city-dwellers to move into strangers’ homes as paying lodgers and sometimes even continue to live there after getting married and starting families of their own.
During the Industrial Revolution, men and women began flocking to urban areas, filling the growing number of blue- and white-collar jobs in factories and offices. Rooming houses and residential hotels offered them basic, affordable accommodations, historian Paul Groth said in the book “Living Downtown,” which traces the rise and fall of the phenomenon.
By 1919, the Providence City Directory listed two full pages of boarding and rooming houses. Some were dirty, violent flophouses run by slumlords, newspaper accounts from the time indicate. But most provided respectable homes for young people striking out on their own or professionals moving to a new city in search of work.
Today, rooming houses can still be the most convenient, cost-effective option for people whose careers bring them to an unfamiliar city. Most tenants, though, are locals who hold lowerwage jobs: There’s an Uber driver, a forklift operator, waitresses and gas station attendants.
Some tenants temporarily land at rooming houses while they’re getting divorced or struggling financially. Others, especially those on a fixed income, are looking for a place to live out the rest of their lives.
“Sometimes it’s just a stepping stone,” LeBlanc said. “They’ll come here for a few months, get things situated, and then they can move on. And in some cases they don’t. For instance, me. I’m not moving out.”
Tenants tend to be single; Archambault said he’s had bad experiences renting to couples. No overnight guests are allowed, and LeBlanc patrols the building at night to make sure that no one’s breaking the rules.
Archambault said he conducts background checks on all tenants, but a criminal record isn’t necessarily a deal breaker.
“I’ll rent to anybody that is honest with me,” he said. Sex offenders sometimes live in his buildings, “and, you know what, they are the best tenants, because they stay clean and they keep to themselves.”
Decline and demolition
Even at the peak of their popularity, rooming houses drew suspicion from progressive crusaders, who viewed them as unacceptably crowded, likely to spread disease, conducive to immoral behavior and responsible for declining birth rates.
But the push to eradicate them began in earnest in the 1950s as part of an urban renewal movement that sought to eliminate poverty by getting rid of the places where poor people lived.
Rooming houses, though not yet exclusively inhabited by the down and out, were considered a form of blight and a threat to property values. The American Planning Association summed up the prevailing sentiment in a 1957 report, labeling them as “both symptoms and causes of neighborhood decay.”
In Providence, about 400 people were displaced from rooming houses that were torn down in one neighborhood to make room for Interstate 95 in the early 1960s. Many were elderly and had been paying $4 to $8 a month in rent. Another slum clearance project led to the demolition of an additional 50 rooming houses.
Urban reformers had valid concerns about living conditions inside rooming houses, which could quickly become firetraps. In 1964, after three men were killed in a Woonsocket blaze, the city’s chief housing inspector determined that 17 out of 19 licensed rooming houses weren’t meeting minimum safety standards.
The problem was that once derelict rooming houses were demolished, nothing better came along to replace them. New public housing complexes were constructed, but they didn’t have enough room for everyone who’d been forced to move in the name of urban renewal.
The end result, The Providence Journal reported in 1973, was that people wound up in neighborhoods “almost as rundown as the slum they left,” while paying considerably more rent.
By then, municipal leaders in the state’s urban core had not only bulldozed dozens of rooming houses but also enacted zoning ordinances that effectively outlawed new ones.
Even though tenants routinely lacked cars, some communities made rooming houses subject to off-street parking requirements. Others changed their zoning ordinances so that converting large, impractical Victorian mansions into rooming houses would no longer be allowed by right.
Gentrification also took a toll in other ways. In desirable areas, rooming houses were snapped up by investors eager to turn them back into single-family homes or transform them into offices for lawyers and doctors. Between 1975 and 1987, as Newport transitioned from a Navy town to a tourist destination, the city went from having more than a dozen rooming houses to just one.
In less desirable areas, meanwhile, some rooming houses became open markets for drugs and prostitution. Others, neglected by absentee landlords, fell into severe disrepair.
There were suspicious fires, as well as others that were all too predictable – sparked by smoldering cigarettes, unsafe wiring or illegal cooking equipment.
Demand high at remaining sites
According to HousingWorks RI, the average two-bedroom apartment in Woonsocket rents for $1,403 a month
Archambault charges only about half that amount for his single rooms: New tenants pay $650 a month, or $150 a week, plus an additional $100 deposit when they move in. Utilities are included, aside from air conditioning, which costs an additional $15 per week (or $50 per month) in summer.
His long-term tenants pay even less than that, he said, since he tries not to raise rents for existing tenants.
Demand is high enough that Archambault doesn’t need to do much advertising – at most, he posts on Craigslist once or twice a year. Often, he said, he gets referrals from social service agencies such as Community Care Alliance.
He lives in one of his own rooming houses. It was a decision prompted by turmoil in his personal life, he said, as well as a desire to see what rooming house life was really like.
“There’s not a better place to live,” he said.
Article Name:Once an affordable option, rooming houses becoming harder to find A place to land
Publication:The Spectrum & Daily News
Author:Antonia Noori Farzan Providence Journal USA TODAY NETWORK
Start Page:1D
End Page:1D
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Rooming Houses article (by Wilma [PA]) Mar 17, 2024 1:10 PM
Rooming Houses article (by GKARL [PA]) Mar 17, 2024 1:24 PM
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